Aqui Gorka

Web sites in Flash are visually attractive but they don’t comply with search engines. This has deprecated Flash for the development community. Truth be told, developers have not truly realized Flash’s real potential. The fact that it doesn’t work with search engines doesn’t mean it should be dismissed for there’s a lot of Web applications where Flash can come in very handy.

Flash’s capable of reloading information in an asynchronus way (without reloading the whole page) which can be very practical for Email systems, games, or Web sites that do not require a search engine to index its content (content manager systems). It can also mantain direct conections with a server so that any user with a Flash client can be updated with changes (in a chat or instant messaging software or a game any time someone comes in, sends a message or moves everyone connected or viewing the page recieve information about the events).

Amongst other things Flash can communicate with technologies that mantain an MVC and SOA framework. It can resolve Webservices developed in any other platform. Thus, it becomes extemely useful, you could develop applications with a strong graphic interface and a backend system running on any given technology (C++, LISP up to Java). Imagine rendering a virtual world in a technology as C++ and simply transfering the data to Flash (without no further need of procedures, hence no extra use of computer resources). It would even be suitable for Web.

How could we use Flash for a Web site that needs high security measures if we all know swf files can be decompiled? If your application arquitecture is well designed then there’s nothing to worry about. SWF files, although not opensource, can be decompiled and read freely, which is nothing different to HTML (anyone can look at a Web page’s source code). If there is no security risk from using business logic in Flash, then the whole system is secure.
*Note - this takes for granted an MVC (Model-View-Controller) framework where Flash is used for the View part of the proyect.

Now for the main issue against Flash: Why is it search engines read the View part of proyects with layout design already applied to it? Shouldn’t search engines be reading raw unformatted data? If search engines had access to this data there wouldn’t be any issues around the different methods and objects regarding its display (AJAX would be useful for search engines as well; Javascript could be used to write complete webpages; Flash could be considered for Web developing again.), besides, this is another way to separate data from format in systems. There are some obvious drawbacks to this method, anyone could send fake raw data and then display any amount of thrash. To tell you the truth, this already happens, but if the method is accepted gradually, search engines could read the data and HTML to look for differences and desicion taking.

It is a broad subject open for discussion, but don’t leave Flash technology out because of what you hear out there, for there are a lot of advantages you weren’t aware of.

Cheers,
Gorka

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 28th, 2007 at 4:43 pm and is filed under English. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.